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EDUCATION

How one man’s mission is

bringing Ladakh its !rst
university
By सौरभ राय
March 22, 2018, Updated on : Thu Sep 05 2019 12:53:30 GMT+0530

460 CLAPS

Sonam Wangchuk’s famous SECMOL plans to

launch Himalayan Institute of Alternatives,
Ladakh, to encourage experiential learning via
practical application of knowledge.

“People living in mountainous regions, in general,

and Ladakh, in particular, are a microscopic
minority in India. Not only are we an ethnic and
linguistic minority, but our climatic and
technological challenges too are unique,”
contends Sonam Wangchuk, who has dedicated
the past three decades of his life to reforming the
education system in Ladakh to be more inclusive
and empathetic of the lives and the trials and
tribulations of the people of the hills.

He and his team now plan to launch the

Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL)
in Phyang, to enable people living in the terrain
to understand the challenges faced by their
people and to empower them with
environmentally sustainable solutions to these
problems.

Away from the spotlight

Sonam shot to fame in 2009, when the popular

Bollywood film 3 Idiots featured a character
'Phunsukh Wangdu', inspired by him. However,
his journey off the spotlight has been a long and
trying one. During his own schooling, he felt that
the conventional education system was
alienating, especially for people of remote
terrains and ethnicity like himself.

This led him to found SECMOL (Students’

Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) in
1988, a non-profit, non-governmental
organisation in trans-Himalayan India, in order to
bring reforms in the state school system, and
then the education reform project Operation
New Hope, to improve matriculation exam
results for the region.

“These initiatives have become a nursery for

innovative solutions for challenges facing
mountain people - from passive solar mud
buildings that do not need any heating in winters
to artificial glaciers that freeze wasteful water in
winter for use in spring time when there is water
crisis,” Sonam explains.

HIAL – a giant leap

“Ladakh does not have any university in the

whole region, which has led to a mass exodus of
roughly 15,000 youth to cities like Jammu,
Srinagar and Chandigarh. Here, they live like
educational refugees, learn very little that is of
relevance to their lives and return as misfits for
the mountain environment,” Sonam says.

With the aim to fill this gap, SECMOL plans to

launch HIAL to encourage experiential learning
via practical application of knowledge. Apart
from academics, each school of the university
will have an enterprise wing with live labs where
the students will work on and learn from real-life
projects.

“The School of Sustainable Tourism

will run high-end, solar-heated, mud-
built hotels and homestays. The
School of Sustainable Architecture
will develop a smart green city
around the university. The School of
Environmental Studies will
undertake projects to combat
climate change,” Sonam adds.

The first course of HIAL will be a two-year

Diploma in Integrated Mountain Development,
that will have four semesters from April 2018 to
March 2020. In the first year, the students will
learn skills and in the second year, they will learn
to apply the learning to real life. They will work
under on-ground experts and launch their own
startup businesses around the solutions that
most trigger their passion. These semesters—
Environmental Studies, Sustainable Tourism,
Sustainable Architecture and Sustainable
Entrepreneurship—are planned to gradually
branch out and grow into full-fledged schools.

The HIAL project will directly benefit the 2,500

people of Phyang Valley and the 15,000 students
studying in other cities across India and indirectly
the residents of Ladakh .The project has a strong
support system of local partners. His Holiness
Skyabgon Chetsang Rinpochey of Phyang
Monastery, one of the highest spiritual leaders in
Tibetan Buddhism, is the Chief Patron of HIAL.
The villagers, through their representatives, are
part of the steering committee of the project.
The Hill Council government is the advisor to the
project.

A microcosm of a sustainable
social system

HIAL is structured such that it will

become completely self-sustaining,
both financially and environmentally.
It will be built of natural materials
like earth, powered by the sun,
watered by artificial glaciers and
nurtured by humans.

The HIAL will be a residential school with a

capacity of 100 students and 10 faculty
members. The plan for the initial few years will
be designing the curriculum for all the courses,
recruitment of faculty, their induction,
orientation and training on a continuous basis,
and increasing the students admitted from 20 in
the first year to 60 in the fifth.

The HIAL will be built on the SEMCOL model,

which has financed itself independently for a
decade now. The new campus will be
sustainable, economical, almost entirely run on
solar power, grow most of its own food, create
small businesses to complete its learning and
generate revenues.

The institution will generate its annual recurring

expenses and run without support from donors
or government. The money from awards or
grants will be used only for capital expenses i.e.,
to build infrastructure or launch big projects. It
will also charge its students only a nominal fee.
Sonam tells us,

In fact the students pay, but only in

sweat equity and imagination,
something that does not
discriminate between rich and poor.

ENVIRONMENT LADAKH ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION EDUCATION

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

347+ SHARES

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